User blog:Mr. Bambu/Creepypasta Calc: The Thing That Stalks The Fields
Premise The Thing That Stalks The Fields is a VERY minor character, but worthy of calc'ing. Let's just try to calc a few of his feats, of which he has a surprising amount, all things considered. Calcs The One Where He Moves a Bunch of Hay So, The Thing is stated to move massive hay bales like this (literally the image from the story) around each night. Here's a few quotes to support. "It was a few weeks ago that the hay bales started creeping slowly away from the house. Every morning when I woke up, each had moved a few hundred feet from where it was before. I assumed it was pranksters with nothing better to do, so I ignored it." We'll try to get GPE for this feat. To know the height, we'll add the cylinder's sideways height to the beasts. Here's another quote. "It stalked, hunched and deliberate, through the field with the posture of a tiptoeing thief. If not for the fact that it must have towered to over ten feet tall even in its crouched position, it might have seemed almost frail." For this, we will compare the height of the grass to the hay bale. Standard height for grass is 3.5 inches (8.89 cm). 170.68 cm is our final height for the hay bale. Halve this for a radius of 85.34 cm. 90.56 is our height. Our final volume is 2.07 x 10^6 cubic centimeters. This is 2.07 cubic meters. Density of Hay is 300 kg/m^3. So... 621 kg. 4.76 meters is our total height here (10 feet + height of hay bale, 170.68 cm). PEg = mgh = 28968.408 Joules, or Wall level Moving on. The One Where He Bullies a Car "The car worked its way slowly along the road, trundling across the uneven ground. I urged it silently to hurry. It was when it passed between the two bales placed on either side of the road that I began to hear a booming clatter from the woods. The thing burst suddenly from between the trees, sprinting on all four of its terrible, gangly limbs towards the car. Within a few seconds it was there, pouncing on the automobile like a predatory cat. Within moments it was picking and peeling the vehicle’s steel frame apart, working to get at the driver." Basically, the Thing destroys the upper bit of a car (and likely the rest of it, as the rest of the car is seen a bit later with the engine exposed and "sputtering"). So. Let's assume violent fragmentation. We don't know the make of the car, of course. We will assume a common car was used. The Honda Civic is the most common car in the US. Here it is. Normal tire size is about 35 inches tall (88.9 cm). Comparing this to the roof of the car, we get 10.46 cm for the height of the car's top. We get a length of 369.42 cm for the upper part of the car. We'll use this image for width. We get 131.04 cm. We have our dimensions. 506356.61cubic centimeters is our final result. It was stated "Within moments it was picking and peeling the vehicle’s steel frame apart, working to get at the driver. The man, whoever he was, screamed all the while and I could hear him even over the crunching of metal and the shattering of glass." I'll assume V. Frag for all of this. It's stated to be steel. 568.5 j/cc x 506356.61 cc = 2.879 x 10^8 Joules, or Room level The One Where He Crashes Through the Trees "It was when it passed between the two bales placed on either side of the road that I began to hear a booming clatter from the woods. The thing burst suddenly from between the trees, sprinting on all four of its terrible, gangly limbs towards the car." It sounds like he busted some trees, though this is largely conjecture. Oh well. According to this, trees normally get uprooted by wind blowing upwards against them, meaning stronger than the force of gravity. Gravity is 9.8 m/s. For a low-end, we will assume just above this- 9.9 m/s. For tree weight, I'm lazy so let's assume they are a fir tree, which we have a weight for from a calc I did earlier- found here. Our weight is 572400 kg. Using the KE calculation (KE = 1/2m * v^2), we get 2.805 x 10^7 Joules, or''' Room level'. Tallies '''The Thing Moves Hay: 28968.408 Joules, Wall level' The Thing Tears Apart a Car Roof: 2.879 x 10^8 Joules, Room level The Thing Pushes Over Trees: 2.805 x 10^7 Joules, Room level Category:Creepypasta Category:Blog posts